According to Robert Markley, historians and philosophers of science who link the rise of science to the rise of modern, objective forms of writing are interpreting the works of Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, and their contemporaries far too narrowly. Focusing on the crises of representation in the discourse of physico-theology in English natural philosophy from 1660 to 1740, Markley demonstrates the crucial role played by theology in the development of modern science.

This in-depth examination of the life, history, and influence of Muhammad as discussed by leading scholars provides a wide-ranging look at the prophet's legacy unlike any other in the field of Islamic and culture studies. Within the Islamic world, the prophet Muhammad's influence is profound. But even outside of the religion of Islam, this visionary had a wide-ranging impact on history, society, literature, art, philosophy, and theology. Within this work's more than 200 A–Z entries, internationally recognized scholars summarize views of Muhammad from the earliest editors of the Qu'ran to contemporary Muslim theologians. This detailed resource explores the traditions, ceremonies, and beliefs of Islam as they have spread worldwide, and examines Muhammad's role in other religious traditions as well as the secular world. Muhammad in History, Thought, and Culture: An Encyclopedia of the Prophet of God distills 14 centuries of thinking about Muhammad, fully capturing his enduring legacy. This encyclopedia will benefit any reader seeking a greater understanding of the founder of Islam, the fastest-growing religion in the world. No other publication discusses Muhammad at such a high level of detail while remaining easily accessible to non-specialist, Western audiences.

It is an irony that despite having a plethora of biographical and historical works on the life of the Prophet of Islam, it is difficult to understand his true historical personality. He never claimed to possess any superhuman qualities, and the Quran also reiterated that he was only a human being. Over the course of centuries, however, the hagiographical writings of Islamic historians almost amounted to his deification. And in modern times, when Western historians started sketching his historical biography, the pendulum swung to the other extreme. In complete disregard of his religious personality, they viewed his life in purely mundane terms, depicting him as a worldly character amenable to the vices of the time. As a true historical sketch of his life has therefore become blurred in biographical works of both categorieshagiographical accounts by the Muslim writers and motivated historiography by the OrientalistsThe Prophet of Islam in History evaluates historical writings about the Prophet by both types of writers, and it presents a total and unbiased history of his life in a systematic and chronologically acceptable manner. With different events of his life integrated in their true historical contexts, it presents a gradual evolution of his religious as well as political personality. Since the life of Muhammad is the key to understanding Islam amid its current aberrations as well as misrepresentations, the subject assumes great importance in the quest to know what the founder of Islam actually preached.

The lead essay in this book is the first effort to approach the historical figure of Muhammad in a manner comparable to the investigations that biblical scholars have made in the effort to recover the historical figure of Jesus. Using comparable methods and approaches, this study demonstrates that despite a widely held belief that Islam was born "in the full light of history," we in fact know considerably less about both Muhammad and the beginnings of Islam than we do about the historical Jesus and the beginnings of Christianity. Also included are republications of four previously published essays dealing with such topics as the Qur'an's status as a late ancient biblical apocryphon, the relation between the Jerusalem Temple and the Holy House revered by the Qur'an, and the imminent eschatology of the Qur'an and the early Islamic tradition.

Early Quaker encounters with Muslims in the seventeenth century helped generate some of the most distinctive and, at times, sympathetic Christian responses to Islam found in the early modern era. Texts such as George Fox's To the Great Turk (1680), in which he engaged in extensive, constructive exegesis of the Qur'an, demonstrate a conception of Islam and Muslims that disrupts many prevailing assumptions of the period. Some responses are all the more striking as they came about as a reaction to the enslavement of a number of Quakers by Muslims in North Africa, where, paradoxically, they often experienced religious freedom denied them at home. This study seeks to understand how and why this heterodox Christian sect created such unusual interpretations of Islam by analyzing the experience of these slaves and scrutinizing the distinctive, oppositional culture of the movement to which they belonged. The work has implications that go beyond the specific subject of study and raises questions about the role that such things as apocalypticism and sectarianism can play in interreligious encounters, and the analytical limitations of Orientalism in characterizing Christian representations of Islam in the early modern period.